Foreign Affairs spent almost €17,000 on accommodation for Davos

The Davos bill and what else is on the list

Those two figures sit inside a much larger annual total. The department spent almost €4.2 million on flights last year, with a further €2.58 million paid for hotels and accommodation.

The individual line items are what make the number legible, and a few of them are eye-catching.

The single payment that stands out is €16,645 to Hodel Immobilien, a rental agency based in the Swiss capital, Bern.

It covered official attendance at the annual WEF conference in Davos, during which accommodation costs are notoriously high, the town is small, and prices behave accordingly.

The department also ran up an accommodation bill of just under €13,000 for hotel rooms during the COP30 climate conference in Brazil.

Records show that money was paid to a real estate company in Brasília which rents out apartments.

A separate €11,331.34 went on accommodation for attendance at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice last year.

In New York, more than €7,000 covered an 18-night stay for a staff member at the four-star Shelburne Sonesta during the UN General Assembly, working out at close to €400 a night in a city where September rates are set by the same supply-and-demand logic as Davos.

More than €6,000 was spent on a hotel in Sydney so that three officials could attend a conference on passport security, as per RTÉ News.

They stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel for six nights in deluxe rooms with a "partial harbour view".

An information note said attendance helped "ensure the Irish passport reflects the most recent security and anti-fraud technology."

Given how much the passport is worth to Irish citizens travelling and to the State's reputation, is a defensible line, even if the room description is the bit that will travel furthest.

What the department says

Business class flights were used for one journey involving Australia because of the "extreme long-distance location", the department said.

Invoices included €14,778 for a diplomat and family members to travel with Qatar Airways, and another bill with the same airline for €10,395 covering economy class travel.

Asked about the expenditure, a spokesperson said: "The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the nature of its international work undertakes a significant amount of international travel and uses hotel accommodation in meeting the objectives set in its Strategic Plan."

Why it lands the way it does

None of this is unusual for a foreign ministry, and a country of Ireland's size arguably gets more out of showing up at Davos, COP and the UNGA than a larger state would.

The reason the figures sting is context.

This is the same summer in which Gardaí told to find their own rooms for the Trump visit became a story, and in which a government forum spent weeks examining the cost of doing business in Ireland for everyone else.